Can I just shock you? I don’t like René Magritte.
He doesn’t do anything for me. Too sterile and reserved. Not to go all Tom Wolfe, but I want my Surrealism to be repellent and shocking, political and raw, and not just confounding. Dripping clocks and crawling ants rather than apples and doves. All I ever get from Magritte is a wry smile, a furrowed brow and a knowing nod. I don’t want to just get it, I want to feel it.
So how did I end up spending half of Good Friday walking around Bozar’s new ‘Histoire de ne pas rire. Surrealism in Belgium’ exhibition, in which Magritte features prominently? I’d read a review a few weeks back by Michel Verlinden in the Knack of this and a sister exhibition on the Kunstberg that did a good job of hyping it up. I didn’t have to pay either, thanks to my museum card, and with nothing to do between breakfast with Herself and lunch with a friend, what had I to lose by spending a couple of hours looking at some paintings.
Maybe too, I thought, I could indulge my inner pseud and find a bench on which I could stare thoughtfully at art for a while. Half of Brussels seemed to have the same notions. The exhibition halls were jammed, with groups of school children sitting on the floor making collages and loud guides funnelling large crowds of visitors through the rooms. The dim lighting, low ceiling and the exhibition’s compact scenography only accentuated the cramped feeling. It’s often the case at Bozar; so many people you can’t see the pictures, which is dreadful, or so many pictures that you can’t see the people, which is worse (to quote Oscar Wilde).
There weren’t even any benches to sit down on either, and by the time I’d made my way through the exhibition my knees were giving out and my back was moaning. I was also hungry. Irritable and distracted, basically. Magritte didn’t stand a chance. Is it contrarian to come out of an exhibition on 100 years of Belgian Surrealism and think the best things I’d seen were from a German? That’s not exactly what happened, but I found myself drawn more to the brooding and urgent woodcuts of Max Ernst - and his 1927 Forest rubbing - than the brightly-painted, gaudy kitsch from Magritte’s “Renoir Period”. Dutch writer and sometime Brussels resident Willem Frederik Herman wrote, on visiting a “20 years of Surrealism'' exhibition in the city in the late 1940s, that the best of Surrealism had a dreamlike realism quality to it, in which mastery of composition and technique were vital. Hermans preferred this more formal - to me, standoffish - Surrealism and rejected the idea that Surrealist art had to be “strange, incongruous, abnormal”.
Call me a rube, but that’s the way I like my Surrealism. Which explains why the two Magritte paintings that did make an impression on me were either from a period of pre-Surrealist experimentation - a colourful Braque-ish self-portrait from the early 1920s - or his more energetic and strange, post-war paintings like The Suspect, that the exhibition notes said was a “raw and deliberately outrageous style”. Give me that ragged Surrealism over his clouds and bowler hats.
Alongside quotations from Paul Nougé printed on the walls, the exhibition did also make room for - to me, at least - lesser known Belgian Surrealists. I chortled at Marcel Marien’s L’Introuvable - a round, monocular eyepiece (glass? glasses?) which writer Sulaiman Addonia described variously described in the exhibition notes as a glass for a minion and a political allegory. There was fun in its tactility, and in its uselessness. There was also some work from Jane Graverol and Rachel Baes which was more baldly political in its interrogation of the female body, and all the more engaging for that.
I did eventually find a bench just as my legs were giving out, in front of a gigantic fabric version of James Ensor’s Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889 hung as part of an Ensor exhibition elsewhere in the Bozar compound. Though it was painted almost 40 years before André Breton’s Surrealist manifesto, this was the grotesque, chaotic art I was looking for, alive with fantastical masked figures, gaudy colours, and sacreligious portrayals of Christ on a donkey. The kind of vibrant grand guignol kitsch I want from my Surrealism.
I’d clearly gone to the wrong Bozar exhibition. But you can’t escape Surrealism in Brussels. There’s two Magritte museums, two Surrealism exhibitions, and soon to be one of those awful immersive “experiences” opening at Central Station. The exhibition does a lot of work positioning Brussels as a capital of Surrealism (alongside Paris), and people love to call the city itself surreal. Even the Dutchman Hermans, who lived out the last years of his life in Brussels, took to describing fairly mundane occurrences he experienced as testament to the strange, incongruous, abnormal nature of the city.
Some other time I’ll write about why I chafe against this way of looking at Brussels, why it’s a lazy metaphor, how condescending and limiting it is, and how untrue it is too - how Brussels is, is the rational consequence of the city’s own internal logic!
But that’s an argument for another day.
Miscellaneous Notes
The Willem Frederik Hermans quotes comes from a excellent essay on the writer’s relationship with Brussels and Surrealism by Marc van Zoggel in the collection Écrire Bruxelles/Brussel Schrijven: De stad als inspiratiebron sinds de 19e eeuw.
The other Surrealist exhibition, IMAGINE! 100 Years of International Surrealism, runs at the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten until 21 July.
I had a very cultural Easter Week last week, also managing to get to the cinema. I went to La Bête, with Leah Seydoux and George Mackay. It was weird. I’m not sure I quite got it.
I also finally managed to watch the landmark film Brussels By Night. Expect thoughts on it in a forthcoming newsletter.
What’s Happening
Trying out something new here - if you’ve got an event or a happening coming up in Brussels, let me know and I’ll include it here.
International Carbonara Day this Saturday - at La Tana, or MangiaSempre
Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah is speaking at the Munt as part of Passa Porta’s 20th birthday celebrations. Tickets still available
‘Eileen Gray. Villa E 1027 - Dessins’ is on in Ganshoren until September
The city’s premier beer festival Bxl Beer Fest is looking for community support to help it rover from Covid-era debts and keep going for another year. You can drop them a few euros here